“A Prairie Girl” tells the story of a former prostitute who changes her life by marrying the gay heir to a small-town bank. First, are there still small towns like the one you describe in Montana?

There are. I live near one. But the decline of family agriculture has taken a toll, as have energy booms elsewhere, which draw away working-age people. The Postal Service is trying to close many of the small-town post offices, which have been a daily meeting place since, in the case of my town, the eighteen-eighties. And, as in New England, summer-home gentrification has altered the tone. In some of the prettier valleys, interior decorators are more common than ranch hands. There are fewer Western towns where you can’t get a pedicure. Still, lots of small towns have found a way of enduring, thanks to a mixture of economic activities. The niche manufacturing that I’m aware of includes guitars and mandolins, parts for the space industry, racing bicycles, black-powder target rifles, equipment for feeding livestock, coffee roasters, medical diagnostic kits, furniture, and so on. Every attractive small town in Montana has someone in financial services working digitally from afar.

And are there still brothels like the Butt Hut—the one where Mary Elizabeth Foley gets her start in town—that employ part-time workers from other professions and schoolteachers on summer vacation? And is it really—or was it at some point—common for local men to fall for and want to marry those women?

In the lingering frontier atmosphere, prostitution was less stigmatizing than might be imagined, and the women mostly married locally. But those brothels have been made obsolete by the Internet, and the “providers,” as sex workers are now known, live more privately than when they used to show up for work hours. The anonymous arrangements that can be made with true professionals and part-timers has probably made prostitution more common than ever. I once asked a prosperous baby boomer what he found desirable about the college-girl escorts he employed, and he sang a line from Bob Dylan, “You don’t need no wax job, you’re smooth enough for me!” Sic semper the American horndog.

There’s a great deal of sweetness, as well as humor, in your portrait of this marriage of expedience. Do you think that this kind of relationship would be possible—or even necessary—in the Internet age?

I think so. The relative weightlessness of sexuality in the Internet age, the age of porn, whatever, may have a beneficial result, in that it enlarges the importance of love and companionship when people contemplate sharing destinies. It’s not that sex is an irksome necessity, but some of the cosmology that surrounded it in the age of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin, has evaporated. Think of Pound’s “Fratres Minores” and the discovery that “the twitching of three abdominal nerves has failed to produce a lasting nirvana.” Yet people still seem to want to formalize their affections. Some marry for business reasons, some for sex, some for procreation, and some to legitimize snuggling.

Somehow, Mary Elizabeth has survived all the difficulty life has thrown at her without being twisted by it. She’s ambitious but not cynical, as you say. Why hasn’t she been more damaged by her past?

It’s a mystery, the mystery of survival. Some people have it, most don’t, and we’re fascinated by those who do. We hope to learn from it. As the British advise, “Lips sealed, sooner healed.” It’s a challenge to contemporary ideas about airing failure and inadequacy. This is a girl who grew up on a cattle ranch. I’ve known lots of them, and they don’t build their cases on the bad things that happen to them. A cynic might note that the meat industry teaches you that life is short.

There’s something almost cinematic about the way you capture most of a life in a series of very quick scenes from it. Were you thinking of movies when you wrote this?

I’m not a moviegoer. I grew up in a town without a cinema and never caught the habit, though I have worked in the movies. I stole this narrative strategy from Muhammad Ali: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” It works if you have to cover ground in limited space. One of the limitations of “dirty realism” is that you can’t budge. If you’re a genius like Raymond Carver or his precursor Harold Pinter such confinement is an advantage. But, for many of their successors, it’s claustrophobic. Anyway, a speedier strategy seems to fit stories set in the American West, where demographic persistence is limited and society fluid. I read recently in the Times the story of an escaped Virginia slave who became a rich pickle farmer in Long Island. That’s our country!

Do you think Peter/Pedro will get his own story sometime?

I hadn’t thought of it but I’m thinking about it now. I imagine him looking at his antecedents, puzzling intelligently, working on his story. The more he learns about his parents, the greater is the debt he feels to them. I imagine him as a big success with some worrisome fissures. I’d like to see him as an ur-American, setting out, accomplishing a lot, stalked by loneliness.

Photograph by Christopher Felver/Corbis.

Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.